Last Wednesday, oft-vilified media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced that News Corp. — parent company of (among others) the Times of London, the New York Post, and Fox News — will soon begin charging readers for access to all its news sites.

Reaction was swift and skeptical. In the New York Times, for example, David Carr suggested that Murdoch's statement, which was made during an earnings conference call, might simply have been an attempt to divert attention from News Corp.'s recent fiscal woes. And Michael Wolff — whose Murdoch biography, The Man Who Owns the News, was published last year — argued that Murdoch's plan made sense less as a business proposition than as a manifestation of its author's contrarian temperament. ("What he is going to do," Wolff wrote, "is the thing he has always done: buck convention, offend sensibilities, and not pussyfoot around.")

But might something more profound be at work here? After all, if Murdoch does move a substantial portion of News Corp. content behind a pay wall, the only people he'll be offending will be new-media triumphalists who believe that (as the saying goes) information wants to be free. Meanwhile, he'll actually be endearing himself to scores of old-media luminaries who've never quite kicked the conviction that this is a bunch of BS. (Here's Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, in February: "Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized, and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for.")

Unlike most pundits who've weighed in on Murdoch's move, the Guardian's James Robinson got the irony of Murdoch offering himself as a savior to the Bill Kellers of the world. "One of the most intriguing aspects of the Murdoch plan," Robinson noted, "is that it has recast him as an industry savior in the eyes of some of his critics, who previously regarded him as an enemy of the 'quality journalism' he now claims he is attempting to rescue. . . . If [Wolff] writes a sequel, he may have to call it The Man Who Saved the News."

That's a keen insight — but it needs to be pushed a bit further.

In Wolff's biography, Murdoch emerges as an iconoclast who's also tempted by the siren song of journalistic respectability. His purchase of the Wall Street Journal nicely captured this tension: it could be interpreted either as Murdoch using his deep pockets to scandalize the journalistic priesthood, or as Murdoch using his deep pockets to obtain some highbrow cred.

This paid-content quest, though, suggests that Murdoch's ambivalence may be a thing of the past. True, his success is hardly assured. (If you charge for the Post's Page Six, won't readers just get the same news for free at TMZ or Gawker? And just how much of an online market is there for the Times of London's highbrow culture coverage?) But if Murdoch does make it work, he won't have destroyed some hoary shibboleth. Instead, he'll have retrofitted a deeply traditional model of news consumption for a new age.

Which brings us to Murdoch's motives. As a spur to action, the lure of heroism is fundamentally conservative. After all, you don't seek the gratitude of the masses if you don't care what they think. That's why — despite the uncertainty that currently surrounds Murdoch's aims — it's hard to read this maneuver, which comes as he nears his ninth decade, as anything less than a reluctant renegade's final, belated bid for respectability.

Is Murdoch’s WSJ being snubbed? This year’s Pulitzer Prize box score has the Washington Post taking four prizes (international reporting, feature writing, commentary, and criticism) and the New York Times snagging three (explanatory, national, and investigative reporting).

Murdoch mishegoss Never mind that Rupert Murdoch is shelling out better than $2 billion to buy Metromedia’s seven TV stations. Never mind that he’s then turning around and reselling Boston’s WCVB-TV, Channel 5 to the Hearst Corporation for an astounding $450 million.

News worth paying for? The Providence Journal , offering a rare window onto its own affairs, recently reported that the newspaper could start charging for access to large swaths of projo.com as early as the first quarter of next year.

Holy terror? On the afternoon of November 5, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan walked into a building at Fort Hood, the sprawling military base in central Texas; sat briefly in solitary silence; and then opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol, shooting roughly a hundred rounds and killing 12 soldiers and one civilian.

On the Ground Zero 'Mosque' So what's the big deal? Muslims already pray in the Pentagon, which along with the obliterated World Trade Towers was the other successful terrorist target on September 11, 2001.

Could it happen here? The news a few years back that the Bush administration had convinced the big telecom companies to allow the authorities to spy on customers without warrants, in the name of fighting terrorism, caused a ruckus.

Fourth-estate follies, 2009 edition Between the rise of the Web, the ADD-addling of America, the fragmentation of any national political consensus, and the devastated economy, working in the press can feel a bit like manning the Titanic — and this year, the entire industry seemed to teeter on the edge of oblivion.

BULLY FOR BU! | March 12, 2010 After six years at the Phoenix , I recently got my first pre-emptive libel threat. It came, most unexpectedly, from an investigative reporter. And beyond the fact that this struck me as a blatant attempt at intimidation, it demonstrated how tricky journalism's new, collaboration-driven future could be.

STOP THE QUINN-SANITY! | March 03, 2010 The year is still young, but when the time comes to look back at 2010's media lowlights, the embarrassing demise of Sally Quinn's Washington Post column, "The Party," will almost certainly rank near the top of the list.

RIGHT CLICK | February 19, 2010 Back in February 2007, a few months after a political neophyte named Deval Patrick cruised to victory in the Massachusetts governor's race with help from a political blog named Blue Mass Group (BMG) — which whipped up pro-Patrick sentiment while aggressively rebutting the governor-to-be's critics — I sized up a recent conservative entry in the local blogosphere.

RANSOM NOTES | February 12, 2010 While reporting from Afghanistan two years ago, David Rohde became, for the second time in his career, an unwilling participant rather than an observer. On October 29, 1995, Rohde had been arrested by Bosnian Serbs. And then in November 2008, Rohde and two Afghan colleagues were en route to an interview with a Taliban commander when they were kidnapped.

POOR RECEPTION | February 08, 2010 The right loves to rant against the "liberal-media elite," but there's one key media sector where the conservative id reigns supreme: talk radio.